Events marking International Women’s Day (IWD) on Saturday 8 March include a marathon organ recital on a portable instrument in London Bridge station. Beginning at 9am and ending at 6pm, a wide range of repertoire will be performed by members of the Society of Women Organists (SWO).
BBC Radio 3 celebrates IWD through concerts and broadcasts featuring music by Olga Neuwirth, Sofia Gubaidulina and Ethel Smyth.
The UK premiere of Neuwirth’s orchestral work Dreydl will be broadcast live from Bridgewater Hall in Manchester. Written in 2021, the 11-minute work draws on the imagery of a dreydl, or spinning top, still played with by children at the festival of Hanukkah, and which for Neuwirth has become ‘a symbol of life’. It will be performed in a programme that also includes Gubaidulina’s The Light of the End, a 2003 dramatic work conveying conflict between different orchestral instruments. The works will be performed by the BBC Philharmonic under its Principal Guest Conductor Anja Bihlmaier.
Also on the BBC, Opera on 3 broadcasts the first recording – released in 2023 on Resonus Classics – of Ethel Smyth’s one-act opera Der Wald (The Forest). This tragic love story was premiered in Berlin in 1902, with further stagings at Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera, New York – the only opera by a woman composer to be performed at the Met until Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin in 2016. John Andrews conducts a cast including Natalia Romaniw and Robert Murray, the BBC Singers and BBC Symphony Orchestra.
Elsewhere, the Feminist Folk Club Festival takes place at Cecil Sharp House, London, from 2.45–10pm; tickets can be bought here. And in Cardiff, from 10am–4.30pm, the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama celebrates IWD with a spotlight on female composers and musicians, including Nadia Boulanger, Judith Weir and Cecilia McDowall through panel discussions and concerts led by RWCMD performers and composers, plus an AmserJazzTime special.
Sunday 9 March is Woman Composer Sunday, when churches throughout the country are invited to include music by one or more woman composer. The initiative was launched in 2021 jointly by the Royal College of Organists and SWO, who have published an online list of repertoire suggestions covering three centuries of works by women composers.
International Women’s Day grew from a ‘Women’s Day’ event held on 28 February 1909 in New York City, organised by the Socialist Party of America. The first International Women's Day took place on 19 March 1911. It involved more than a million people in Austria-Hungary, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland demanding women’s suffrage and an end to gender discrimination in the workplace. The United Nations declared 1975 the International Women’s Year and adopted an annual IWD to be held on 8 March.
